Minecraft is now a household name when it comes to open-world sandbox games with building mechanics. It can be played as a survival game, or a building tool where you place 1×1 blocks together in cool and creative ways. It’s basically the ideal Lego game, without the proprietary Lego bricks.
However, there was a moment in time, specifically in 2011, where the Lego Group and Minecraft developers Mojang crossed paths that could potentially lead to a Lego Minecraft game, or Mojang being part of the Lego Group. But it never came to be.
In the first episode of Bits N’ Bricks podcast, hosts Ethan Vincent and Brian Crecente delved into details how Lego greenlit a prototype of a Minecraft-like game using Lego bricks, which was ultimately canned.
The project, codenamed Brickcraft by the Lego Group and Project Rex Kwon Do by Mojang founder Markus “Notch” Persson, started development in late 2011 right after the first retail version of Minecraft was released, only to be cancelled around mid-2012. Notch even tweeted about the project progress.
While both Mojang and the team at Lego Group that oversaw Brickcraft/ Project Rex Kwan Do were excited with the project thanks to a promising playable prototype, ultimately it never came to be and cancelled.
“It became a legal mess on our side of the table, ” said Daniel Mathiasen, formerly at Lego Group and now General Manager at FRVR, in the podcast. “It was back to big corporations and small companies not being able to work together.”
“…it was like little details that messed it up and, in the end, understandably, Mojang, we just can’t waste our time on this, the opportunity cost of sitting and discussing these things.”
This little details includes miscommunication (neither party is clear who are the designers for the project) and Lego insisting not to put in scratch details on their virtual bricks (something Lego has backed down these days- the successful Lego Movie films proudly shows scratches and known defects on their products).
“It was just that our teams were so different and we were a very tiny company,” said Daniel Kaplan, Mojang’s first employee and now working at Coffee Stain Publishing. “The Lego Group had a lot of people just to manage this project that we were working on, and we felt that it was the wrong way of making games, in our opinion.
“And that was, I think that was the core thing that made it really hard for us to continue working on the project.”
After Brickcraft/ Project Rex Kwan Do fell through, there were also efforts in the Lego Group that consider acquiring Mojang. That didn’t happen as the Minecraft developers were sold to Microsoft at a cool $2.5 billion USD in 2014.
When Brickcraft/ Project Rex Kwan Do happened, Lego just cancelled their big MMO game Lego Universe that didn’t pan out, and so there is hesitance on making a big acquisition (especially at the price Microsoft is willing to pay) considering their past ventures didn’t do as well.
The first episode of the Bits N’ Bricks podcast goes into detail on what could’ve been the perfect interlocking match of game and IP ended with Lego making licensed Minecraft sets.
And it’s wild that the podcast, commissioned by the Lego Group as part of the 25-year celebration of its involvement in video games, begins with quite the introspective episode.
The hosts remarked that despite Lego’s near-miss of having been part of a cultural phenomenon, the company is still passionate about chasing that holy grail of making a proper digital Lego experience.
You can listen to the podcast episode in full on the Lego website here.